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akatokuro · 6 years ago

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The Inevitable StS Rewatch, Episodes 26-29

Leo Aiolia is... an angry person, you say? I never would have guessed!

- This whole Aiolia scene is REALLY interesting on a lot of levels and does a lot for his character.

- I love his whole immediate reaction to just hearing that there are deserters on the loose - Sanctuary is a brutal, awful place even without the recent setup of the Pope making things even worse. You are more than likely to get killed if you are a trainee there. It is more than understandable that people would want to escape. But Lia's response is "you fucking morons."

- Well, Lia probably has baggage about people trying to "escape Sancutary" to begin with, but...

- Lia is a decent guy, especially for a Saint, but he's determinedly and deliberately Lawful Neutral as fuck. He jumps in for the deserter babies situation, is clearly stern and unpleased, but then deliberately "softens" to urge the babies to go back. He's not going to be cruel about it, and he's more "merciful" than a lot of Saints would be, but he's also not going to let them go. His preference is resolving this without having to kill anyone, sure - but if it really comes down to it, he's going to uphold Sanctuary Law.

- And then, of course, Lia gets thoroughly disrespected and shittalked to his face by a bunch of Silver fuckwits. Lol at even the trainees calling him "Aiolia-san" vs "Algol-sama." Like, dude... yikes.

- Aiolia is even kind of weirdly meek when protesting, stammering and trailing off and all. You’d never guess this guy is a Gold Saint going from the dynamics in this scene, who could effortlessly squash everyone involved here like a fucking bug.

- And finally, Lia is clearly off-put by the blatant cruelty here, but does he actually do anything about it, whether it's against Algol and Shaina directly or the broader situation? Nah.

- yumetabibito, being the filthy Aiolia-lover she is, went ahead and checked, and this scene didn't exist in the manga, and Toei almost certainly wrote it before the reveal in the manga that Lia is a Gold Saint. It's hard to imagine that it would exist if they had known, because it revolves around Aiolia getting no fucking respect. Presumably, all they had to go off of was that Aiolia cameo from the first chapter, which they seem to have mostly gotten "likes Seiya and Marin?" from. So they’re vaguely trying to align him with them as sort of a sympathetic underdog in Sanctuary.

- But even so... they somehow stumbled into a really good and fitting scene that adds a lot to his character with future context in mind!

- yume and I have talked about, well, okay, Lia gets shit on and bullied for being a traitor's little brother - that's an important part of his characterization and his motives - but where does the hostility towards him really come from? He's clearly well-liked amongst the trainees and the regular soldiers. Among the Golds - okay, yeah, Milo, Deathmask, and Aphrodite would give him shit. (Goddammit, Milo.) But most of the rest of them either don't care or would be sympathetic.

- Getting his face spit on constantly by SILVERS, though, makes a lot of sense and would be even more rage-enducing than getting spit on by his actual peers. Because the Silvers obviously feel "safe". They know that Aiolia can't actually fight back or do anything without validating everything anyone has said about him and his relationship and his brother. He has to take it. And the fact that he just takes it leads to even less respect, with him being seen as a push-over while Aiolia quietly fantasizes about stomping on their broken arms.

- So in that way, it makes sense with the shitty crop of Silvers that around that jerking Leo Aiolia's chain is thought of as actually sort of a fun, twisted game. They get to taunt a fucking GOLD, a "traitor's brother" and wave their dicks around in his face and all the Gold can do is seethe powerlessly.

- tldr; Aiolia is very angry, has always been very angry, and even though it came together like this on accident - scenes like this give a lot of depth and context to that endless, boiling anger to the point that it is really, really fucking funny that it was almost certainly Toei writing out of ignorance of who Aiolia really was. How Aiolia is treated, and how he responds to the situation - both with the deserters themselves and with Algol and Shaina being assholes - says a lot about him.

- Meanwhile, as ridiculous as the [REDACTED] are, I can't help but find the weird sci-fi HQ Saori and the Bronzies have early on charming in a really corny way. I bet Saori really misses leading from this setup compared to that shitty little stone bed and curtain they throw at her when she's at Sanctuary, jesus.

- Man, there really is a lot more SeiShiryuu service than I remembered in these earlier eps. Will never be my ship, tbh - SeiSao is my One True Love - but lmao.

- for some reason saints on a plane always cracks me up no matter how many times i see it

- (note that once again we set up hyouga rushing in to help and then getting there too late to actually do anything. beautiful beautiful failswan)

- every time seiya whines about hitting girls i want there to be a flashback to this bit of him smashing shaina into the cliff face

- Oh for fuck's sake, the Steel fucking S--

- Wait, what was I thinking. What was I talking about. I have no idea. THANK YOU SAORI YOU ARE TRULY THE BEST.

- Shiryuu vs Algol is probably one of the more engaging fights in StS, Gold Saints aside. It's fun to see Shiryuu try to find a workaround to the shield and everything he tries blowing up in his face until he's cornered into jabbing his own eyes out. The sort of contrast between Shiryuu being the Bronzie who has the best chance at actually finding a normal life and a normal happiness with Shunrei, and Shiryuu being the one who keeps throwing himself into getting mauled like this, is probably the most compelling aspect of the character to me.

- One of the things that's also nice about Saint Seiya as a shounen is that it really feels like all of the Bronzies, not just Seiya, are equally crucial members of the team and get their own equally important fights. Like, Shiryuu legitimately gets to star here and save everyone because Seiya fucked it up. I used to like Rurouni Kenshin a lot, but I remember, like, yes - Sanosuke got his "big fight", but it was very much because Kenshin graciously "let" him because he could tell it was important to Sano or whatever. Or in Bleach, where the question of the others in Ichigo's group contributing during Soul Society is basically laughable. Neither really feels like the case in Saint Seiya.

- This is totally where CLAMP got their eye horror fetish from though isn't it. God I still can't believe Saint Seiya is directly responsible for the existence of CLAMP...

- Nothing to really say about the rest of the episode, but I do have to comment:

- Dude, what the FUCK.

- ANY of the Bronzies saying shit like this about Mitsumasa is grotesque, but fucking Ikki actually sort of makes my skin legit crawl. What the fuck, Toei. SOMEONE BRING BACK THE REAL IKKI PLEASE.

- Shunrei is such a good girl. She doesn't deserve this shit, man. What she honestly deserves is the privilege of getting to stab Dohko to death in his sleep--I mean, uh, what?

- THIS WAS COMPLETELY FUCKING UNNECESSARY. WHO THE FUCK SHIPPED THIS ON THE ANIME STAFF I REALLY WANT TO KNOW

- In seriousness, HyoShun is really darling. I love how weirdly attentive Hyouga is to Shun all the time; it's a really charming recurring detail. I IMAGINE SHUN IS CHARMED BY IT TOO.

- Hyouga's good point is that, despite his bluster, he really is a sweet kid who is 100% sincere all the time. He acts tough but it's not like he's tsun or defensive about showing people - mostly Shun - compassion and concern either.

- lmao and then Ikki ditches these losers I like how after the HyoShun he instantly starts acting a million times more in-character. Did seeing the swan touch your little brother enrage you enough to expel the brainworms at last, Ikki...?

- Saori and Ikki are really good in this scene, though. I love everything about their quick exchange - Ikki being contemptuous and defiant of her, Saori answering without hesitation "HELL YES DO WHAT I SAY" when he asks if she's ordering him around. Both in how cool Saori is, but also her frankly falling back onto really bad habits dealing with the Bronzies when she's sort of panicking and doesn't know what to do. I love the scene of her lamenting about how she couldn't stop Ikki and obviously feeling like a fuckup by herself later, too. I really do appreciate that there is attention given to the arc of Saori learning to be a leader.

- I love Sanctuary openly referring to Saori as their leader, even without knowing she’s Athena, too. Damn right she is!

- Though I do still really think Saori should have been more involved in confronting Ikki when he was still extremely (justifiably) buttmad about everything. The idea of those two having a weird, special understanding about what Saori has to answer for would have been really cool...

- AND THEN SAORI GETS KIDNAPPED BY CROWS. YOU KNOW WE'RE BACK IN CANON, BECAUSE INSTEAD OF EVIL NEFARIOUS BUGS, WE HAVE EVIL NEFARIOUS BIRDS!

- Next time: THE SEISAO APOCALYPSE, MOTHERFUCKERS, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS: THE DESTRUCTION OF SEIYA’S BRAIN

#rewatching sts #aquarius camus did nothing wrong

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ship-o-rama · 7 years ago

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Name: Bounty (alternate)

Type: Merchantman

Affiliation: UFP

Captain: James T. Kirk

Year: 2293

Background: Freighter that operates in Federation Space. 5 man-crew are all former Starfleet including his Chief Engineer, Montgomery Scott. When Kirk found time-displaced Mia Colt at the Smithsonian Museum in San Francisco and heard her tale he knew he had to take her back to Algol, now deep in Klingon Space. It didn’t take much convincing to get his crew to do the right thing and they sped towards Algol. The engines however couldn’t take the high warp strain and left them stranded just on the other side of Klingon space, where they were used as target practice by the Klingons. A timely rescue by the Enterprise drove the Klingons away. The crew and passenger were beamed off and the ship presumably left adrift.

Appeared in Star Trek: Early Voyages #13-14, Marvel Comics

#Star Trek #Star Trek Comics #Bounty #Federation #Freighter #Merchantman #spaceship

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ahogedetective · 3 years ago

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@algols replied to your post: “ Whoa Shuichi! You need to...”

"Oh no.. That's not good Saihara-kun. We can do something to get you on the nice list again!" --Nene

“Waaaaah, Yashiro-san... at least you have mercy on me....h-hahah....“ Hangs his head low, but nods it weakly...

“Y...Yes, I would very much like to do that too, thank you... anything to not be hunted down...”

#KJDFNJKD bless you Nene you are so good....#please save this disaster boy he's so hopeless...#algols #📚 || IC;; Shuichi

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erossiniuk · 4 years ago

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Fifty years of Pascal

I don’t know you but it seems yesterday for me I started to code with Basic on my VIC20 and Pascal a couple of years later and now we celebrate fifty years of Pascal. Can’t believe that.

The beginning

In the early 1960s, the languages Fortran (John Backus, IBM) for scientific, and Cobol (Jean Sammet, IBM, and DoD) for commercial applications dominated. Programs were written on paper, then punched on cards, and one waited a day for the results. Programming languages were recognized as essential aids and accelerators of the programming process.

In 1960, an international committee published the language Algol 60. It was the first time a language was defined by concisely formulated constructs and by a precise, formal syntax. Two years later, it was recognized that a few corrections and improvements were needed. Mainly, however, the range of applications should be widened, because Algol 60 was intended for scientific calculations (numerical mathematics) only. Under the auspices of IFIP a Working Group (WG 2.1) was established to tackle this project.

The group consisted of about 40 members with almost the same number of opinions and views about what a successor of Algol should look like. There ensued many discussions, and on occasions the debates ended even bitterly. Early in 1964 I became a member, and soon was requested to prepare a concrete proposal. Two factions had developed in the committee. One of them aimed at a second, after Algol 60, milestone, a language with radically new, untested concepts and pervasive flexibility. It later became known as Algol 68. The other faction remained more modest and focused on realistic improvements of known concepts. After all, time was pressing: PL/1 of IBM was about to appear. However, my proposal, although technically realistic, succumbed to the small majority that favored a milestone.

Poster of Pascal’s syntax diagrams strongly identified with Pascal

The group

It is never sufficient to merely postulate a language on paper. A solid compiler also had to be built, which usually was a highly complex program. In this respect, large industrial firms had an advantage over our Working Group, which had to rely on enthusiasts at universities. I left the Group in 1966 and devoted myself together with a few doctoral students at Stanford University to the construction of a compiler for my proposal. The result was the language Algol W,2 which after 1967 came into use at many locations on large IBM computers. It became quite successful. The milestone Algol 68 did appear and then sank quickly into obscurity under its own weight, although a few of its concepts did survive into subsequent languages.

But in my opinion Algol W was not perfectly satisfactory. It still contained too many compromises, having emerged from a committee. After my return to Switzerland, I designed a language after my own preferences: Pascal. Together with a few assistants, we wrote a user manual and constructed a compiler. In the course of it, we had a dire experience. We intended to describe the compiler in Pascal itself, then translate it manually to Fortran, and finally compile the former with the latter. This resulted in a great failure, because of the lack of data structures (records) in Fortran, which made the translation very cumbersome. After this unfortunate, expensive lesson, a second try succeeded, where in place of Fortran the local language Scallop (M. Engeli) was used.

Pascal

Like its precursor Algol 60, Pascal featured a precise definition and a few lucid, basic elements. Its structure, the syntax, was formally defined in Extended BNF. Statements described assignments of values to variables, and conditional and repeated execution. Additionally, there were procedures, and they were recursive. A significant extension were data types and structures: Its elementary data types were integers and real numbers, Boolean values, characters, and enumerations (of constants). The structures were arrays, records, files (sequences), and pointers. Procedures featured two kinds of parameters, value-and variable-parameters. Procedures could be used recursively. Most essential was the pervasive concept of data type: Every constant, variable, or function was of a fixed, static type. Thereby programs included much redundancy that a compiler could use for checking type consistency. This contributed to the detection of errors, and this before the program’s execution.

Algor

Just as important as addition of features were deletions (with respect to Algol). As C.A.R. Hoare once remarked: A language is characterized not only by what it permits programmers to specify, but even more so by what it does not allow. In this vein, Algol’s name parameter was omitted. It was rarely used, and caused considerable complications for a compiler. Also, Algol’s own concept was deleted, which allowed local variables to be global, to “survive” the activation of the procedure to which it was declared local. Algol’s for statement was drastically simplified, eliminating complex and hard to understand constructs. But the while and repeat statements were added for simple and transparent situations of repetition. Nevertheless, the controversial goto statement remained. I considered it too early for the programming community to swallow its absence. It would have been too detrimental for a general acceptance of Pascal.

Pascal was easy to teach, and it covered a wide spectrum of applications, which was a significant advantage over Algol, Fortran, and Cobol. The Pascal System was efficient, compact, and easy to use. The language was strongly influenced by the new discipline of structured programming, advocated primarily by E.W. Dijkstra to avert the threatening software crisis (1968).

Pascal was published in 1970 and for the first time used in large courses at ETH Zurich on a grand scale. We had even defined a subset Pascal-S and built a smaller compiler, in order to save computing time and memory space on our large CDC computer, and to reduce the turnaround time for students. Back then, computing time and memory space were still scarce.

Pascal’s Spread and Distribution

Soon Pascal became noticed at several universities, and interest rose for its use in classes. We received requests for possible help in implementing compilers for other large computers. It was my idea to postulate a hypothetical computer, which would be simple to realize on various other mainframes, and for which we would build a Pascal compiler at ETH. The hypothetical computer would be quickly implementable with relatively little effort using readily available tools (assemblers). Thus emerged the architecture Pascal-P (P for portable), and this technique proved to be extremely successful. The first clients came from Belfast (C.A.R. Hoare). Two assistants brought two heavy cartons of punched cards to Zurich, the compiler they had designed for their ICL computer. At the border, they were scrutinized, for there was the suspicion that the holes might contain secrets subject to custom fees. All this occurred without international project organizations, without bureaucracy and research budgets. It would be impossible today.

An interesting consequence of these developments was the emergence of user groups, mostly of young enthusiasts who wanted to promote and distribute Pascal. Their core resided under Andy Mickel in Minneapolis, where they regularly published a Pascal Newsletter. This movement contributed significantly to the rapid spread of Pascal.

First microcomputer

Several years later the first microcomputers appeared on the market. These were small computers with a processor integrated on a single chip and with 8-bit data paths, affordable by private persons. It was recognized that Pascal was suitable for these processors, due to its compact compiler that would fit into the small memory (64K). A group under Ken Bowles at the University of San Diego, and Philippe Kahn at Borland Inc. in Santa Cruz surrounded our compiler with a simple operating system, a text editor, and routines for error discovery and diagnostics. They sold this package for $50 on floppy disks (Turbo Pascal). Thereby Pascal spread immediately, particularly in schools, and it became the entry point for many to programming and computer science. Our Pascal manual became a best-seller.

This spreading did not remain restricted to America and Europe. Russia and China welcomed Pascal with enthusiasm. This I became aware of only later, during my first travels to China (1982) and Russia (1990), when I was presented with a copy of our manual written in (for me) illegible characters and symbols.

Pascal’s Successors

But time did not stand still. Rapidly computers became faster, and therefore demands on applications grew, as well as those on programmers. No longer were programs developed by single persons. Now they were being built by teams. Constructs had to be offered by languages that supported teamwork. A single person could design a part of a system, called a module, and do this relatively independently of other modules. Modules would later be linked and loaded automatically. Already Fortran had offered this facility, but now a linker would have to verify the consistency of data types also across module boundaries. This was not a simple matter!

Modules with type consistency checking across boundaries were indeed the primary extension of Pascal’s first successor Modula-2 (for modular language, 1979). It evolved from Pascal, but also from Mesa, a language developed at Xerox PARC for system programming, which itself originated from Pascal. Mesa, however, had grown too wildly and needed “taming.” Modula-2 also included elements for system programming, which admitted constructs that depended on specific properties of a computer, as they were necessary for interfaces to peripheral devices or networks. This entailed sacrificing the essence of higher languages, namely machine-independent programming. Fortunately, however, such parts could now be localized in specific “low-level” modules, and thereby be properly isolated.

Apart from this, Modula contained constructs for programming concurrent processes (or quasiparallel threads). “Parallel programming” was the dominant theme of the 1970s. Overall, Modula-2 grew rather complex and became too complicated for my taste, and for teaching programming. An improvement and simplification appeared desirable.

Oberon

From such deliberations emerged the language Oberon, again after a sabbatical at Xerox PARC. No longer were mainframe computers in use, but powerful workstations with high-resolution displays and interactive usage. For this purpose, the language and interactive operating system Cedar had been developed at PARC. Once again, a drastic simplification and consolidation seemed desirable. So, an operating system, a compiler, and a text editor were programmed at ETH for Oberon. This was achieved by only two programmers—Wirth and Gutknecht—in their spare time over six months. Oberon was published in 1988. The language was influenced by the new discipline of object-oriented programming. However, no new features were introduced except type extension. Thereby for the first time a language was created that was not more complex, but rather simpler, yet even more powerful than its ancestor. A highly desirable goal had finally been reached.

Even today Oberon is successfully in use in many places. A breakthrough like Pascal’s, however, did not occur. Complex, commercial systems are too widely used and entrenched. But it can be claimed that many of those languages, like Java (Sun Microsystems) and C# (Microsoft) have been strongly influenced by Oberon or Pascal.

Around 1995 electronic components that are dynamically reprogrammable at the gate level appeared on the market. These field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) can be configured into almost any digital circuit. The difference between hardware and software became increasingly diffuse. I developed the language Lola (logic language) with similar elements and the same structure as Oberon for describing digital circuits. Increasingly, circuits became specified by formal texts, replacing graphical circuit diagrams. This facilitates the common design of hardware and software, which has become increasingly important in practice.

Download and run Turbo Pascal in DosBox

Now, if you want to run Turbo Pascal on your Windows 10 machine, you need an virtual environment where MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) can run under Windows.

So, I found DosBox Frontend Reloaded. D-Fend Reloaded is a graphical environment for DOSBox. DOSBox emulates a complete computer including the DOS command line and allows to run nearly all old DOS based games on modern hardware with any of the newer Windows versions.

With DOSBox there is no need to worry about memory managers or free conventional RAM, but the setup of DOSBox is still a bit complicated. The configuration of DOSBox via textbased setup files might be difficult for beginners. D-Fend Reloaded may help and create these files for you. Additionally the D-Fend Reloaded installation package contains DOSBox (including all lanuage files currently available), so there is only one installation to be run and no need to link D-Fend Reloaded with DOSBox manually. Now, install D-Fend following the wizard.

Then, you can download a copy of Turbo Pascal 7.1 from Vetusware.com that collects free abandonware.

After the installation of D-Fend, under your user in Windows 10, you find D-Fend Reloaded folder and in it VirtualHD folder.

Where is the VirtualHD for D-Fend Reloaded?

In VirtualHD folder, create a new folder like TP7 and in this one extract the file from Vetusware.com.

Extract file for Turbo Pascal 7

Now, run D-Fend Reloaded and click on the button Add and select Add with wizard. Skip the first page of the wizard and them you have to select the Program to be started. Click on the button at the end of the textbox and then select TURBO.EXE under BIN under TP7.

Create new profile

Click Next until the end of the wizard. Then, from the list, right-click on the profile you have just created and select Edit. Then, click on DOS environment and check the PATH

Z:\;C:\TP7;C:\TP7\UTILS;C:\TP7\UNITS;C:\TP7\EXE;

Profile editor for Turbo Pascal

Then, you are ready. Double click on the profile and your Turbo Pascal 7.1 is up and running.

Turbo Pascal 7.1

Do you remember the Help? Ok, I know, this is a sign of my age.

Turbo Pascal 7.1 Help

The post Fifty years of Pascal appeared first on PureSourceCode.

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#News #pascal #retrocomputers

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folkinsomnia · 4 years ago

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planet + algol for space memes? :)

Planet - have you ever lost anything important, such as your passport, keys, or a phone?

Yes!! I've never outright lost a phone, but my hideous pink Motorola Razr was stolen out of my purse at a school dance when I was in 8th grade, so I had to go back to using my sister's hand-me-down pink LG Chocolate, which I still consider one of THE best pre-smartphone cellphones! For aesthetic reasons.

One time in high school I lost my wallet at the county fair, and in it was my driver's license and school ID and some money and such. A person found it and turned it in sans money, but by then I'd already gotten a new license. Tragedy!!

Algol - favorite planet? Favorite space object?

Planets - because I cannot choose one - are definitely Jupiter and Pluto (I know it's no longer classified as a planet, but it WAS one until I was in sixth grade, dammit!), and then kinda Mercury and Venus as well, on a lesser scale? It's so hard to choose a favorite!! And I'm not familiar enough with non-solar system planets to choose among those, tbh.

Space objects - I'm a simple woman. I fuckin love black holes and wanted to go into astrophysics back in the day to study black holes specifically.

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mariepascaleremy · 5 years ago

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Des nouvelles de la comète Swan

Swan est désormais visible à l’œil nu. Elle est actuellement située près de la constellation des Poissons. Les nuits des 19, 20 et 21 mai, Swan sera très proche de l’étoile Algol (connue sous le nom "d’étoile du démon"). Pour l'instant nous pouvons voir Vénus, très brillante, au coucher du soleil. Vénus est en train de s’aligner avec le soleil, donc se rapprocher, pour être en position exacte au-dessus du croissant de lune, entre les deux cornes de la constellation du Taureau... Et ce le 24 mai. Vénus symbole de la femme, symbole de la Vierge. Une Vénus, illuminée par le Soleil, avec la Lune en dessous n'est pas sans rappeler la Femme vêtue de Soleil avec la Lune à ses pieds (la femme de l’Apocalypse menacée par la Bête). Est-ce le signe de la Vierge qui écrase la tête du serpent de son talon ? Ces alignements célestes se produiront-ils au moment où Atlas et Swan devraient se croiser, le 24 mai ?

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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HOW TO DO THINGS

He has since relaxed a bit on that point. So a truly effective refutation would look like: The author's main point seems to be merging with the descendants of Algol. They're determined by VCs starting from the amount the company needed to raise and let the percentage acquired vary with the market, instead of a lifetime's service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your own company, because you're only replacing one segment instead of discarding the whole thing. When most people hear the word startup, they think of the famous ones that have gone public. So the fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros—without which, in my opinion, are math, the hard sciences, engineering, history especially economic and social history, and the things they complain about are unsatisfied demand. I've seen people cross-posting on Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN.1 Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write this that's shorter? If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same whether it succeeds or fails.2 Far from it. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so must people trying to write systems software on multi-cpu computers. That's why those quotes from Korea sound so old fashioned. Ironically, of all the different types of work, and the history of science, architecture, and the harder performance is to measure, the more important it is to write.

A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. One helpful trick here is to use the length of the program as an approximation for how much work it is to predict it. When I got to Yahoo, I found myself thinking: I can understand why German universities declined in the 1930s, after they excluded Jews. PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and in their own blog posts. Ask not just whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other. But while some amount of bullshit in your life by more than you decrease your income. That's what you're addicted to. So any Web-based application that Microsoft ends up with, will probably, like Hotmail, be something developed outside the company.

The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitch is to realize that they all started from the same document back at the PR firm.3 Other times nothing seems interesting. It's hard for such people to design great software, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. Remember that. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to learn how to hack Blub on Windows. Hacker News was two years old last week. Often they have to be willfully blind not to see it. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer. The central problem in big companies.4 Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. This is to be rewritten.

Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles you have to understand what they need. I think there are a lot of room for improvement here. Most people could do better. Dilution is a hard problem. But it will be a problem in fussier countries. Arguably the people in the US. But I would like to avoid making these mistakes.

You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as it's hard to write a cool piece of software. It will take more experience to know for sure, but they don't need to have empathy not just for the local market. So there could be a legitimate reason for arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said: when you feel they missed the heart of the matter. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. And they were worth it. Dressing down loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes Tenisha Mercer of The Detroit News. For the first year, our initial reaction to news of a competitor was always: we're doomed. Every existing language is missing something. And so it proved this summer. In any academic field there are topics that are ok to work on and others that aren't.

Notes

I've said into something that doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the thing to do it for had disappeared. But there are only pretending to in order to pick a date, because it looks great when a startup idea is bad. Unless of course there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers.

Surely no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because a part has come unscrewed, you can send your business plan to make money for other reasons, avoid casual conversations with other investors, is this someone you want to invest more.

PR didn't work out a chapter at a middle ground. The kind of power will start to pull it off. Y Combinator certainly never asks what classes you took in college. There are fields now in which many people mistakenly think it might take an hour just to steal a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old to get into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco.

The idea is the unpromising-seeming startups that are only slightly richer for having these things.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Dan Giffin for reading a previous draft.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #year #island #work #software #reason

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techscorn · 5 years ago

Link

My second language after basic. via krypted

PASCAL was designed in 1969 by the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth and released in 1970. Wirth was a PhD student at Berkeley in the early 1960s, at the same time Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and author of the Go programming language was in school there. It’s not uncommon for a language to kick around for a decade or more gathering steam. In 1983, PASCAL got legit and was standardized, in ISO 7185. The next year Wirth would win the 1984 Turing Award. Perhaps he listened to When Doves Cry when he heard.

PASCAL is named after Blaise Pascal, the French Philosopher and Mathemetician. PASCAL was built to teach students to program, but as with many tools students learn on, it grew in popularity as those students graduated from college throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I learned PASCAL in high school computer science in 1992. Yes, Kris Kross was making you Jump and Billy Ray Cyrus was singing Achy Breaky Heart the same year his daughter was born. I learned my first if, then, else, case, and while statements in PASCAL.

PASCAL is a procedural programming language that supports structured data structures and structured programming.At the time I would write programs on notebook paper and type them in next time I had a chance to play with a computer. I also learned enumerations, pointers, type definitions, and sets. PASCAL also gave me my first exposure to integers, real numbers, chars, and booleans. I can still remember writing the word program at the top of a piece of paper, followed by a word to describe the program I was about to write. Then writing begin and end. Never forgetting the period after the end of course. The structures were simple. Instead of echo you would simply use the word write to write text to the screen, followed by hello world in parenthesis wrapped in single quotes. After all, there are special characters if you use a comma and an exclamation point in hello word. I also clearly remember wrapping my comments in {} because if you didn’t comment what you did it was assumed you stole your code from Byte managize. I also remember making my first procedure and how there was a difference between procedures and functions. The code was simple and readable. Later I would use AmigaPascal and hate life.

PASCAL eventually branched out into a number of versions including Visual PASCAL, Instant PASCAL, and Turbo PASCAL. There are still live variants including the freepascal compiler available at freepascal.org. PASCAL was the dominant language used in the early days of both Apple and Microsoft. So much so that most of the original Apple software was written in PASCAL, including Desk Accessories, which would later become Extensions. Perhaps the first awesome computer was the Apple II, where PASCAL was all over the place. Because developers knew PASCAL, it ended up being the main high-level language for the Lisa and then the Mac. In fact, some of the original Mac OS was hand-translated to assembly language from PASCAL. PASCAL wasn’t just for parts of the operating system. It was also used for a number of popular early programs, including Photoshop 1.

PASCAL became object-oriented first with Lisa Pascal, Classcal then with Object PASCAL in 1985. That year Apple released MacApp, which was an object oriented API for the classic Mac Operating system. Apple stuck with Object PASCAL until 1991, when it transitioned to C++ for System 7. MacApp would go on to burn a fiery death when Apple acquired NeXT.

PASCAL wasn’t just for Apple. Universities all over the world were using PASCAL, including the University of California San Diego, which introduced UCSD Pascal, which was a branch of Pascal-P2. UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems you could run on the original IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft would then implement the Object Pascal compiler, which caught on with developers that wanted to get more than what BASIC offered. Around this time, people were actually making real money and BORLAND released Turbo Pascal, making it cheap to grab big marketshare. Object PASCAL also begat Delphi, still used to write programs by people who refuse to change today.

Wirth himself was fascinating. He not only wrote The Pascal User Manual and Report but also went on to write an article called Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about how to teach programming and something all computer science teachers and aficionados should read. His book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs helped shape how I think of computers even today, because it turns out the more things change the more they stay the same.

He also coined Wirth’s law, which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. Every time I see a beachball or hourglass on my laptop I think of that. This could be initially from his work on building a compiler into the ALGOL language, which resulted in ALGOL W and watching that turn into the swamp thing that was ALGOL X and then ALGOL 68, which became so complex and difficult that writing good compilers became out of the question. Due to this ALGOL languished, making room for PASCAL in the hearts of early programmers.

While PASCAL is his most substantial contribution to computing, he also designed Algol, Modula and Oberon, and did two sabbaticals at Xerox PARC, the first from 1976–1977 and the second from 1984–1985. Here, he would have been exposed to a graphical operating system and the mouse, before Apple popularized them.

Perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of PACAL though, is A. A is a computer pogromming language that was originally written as a hoax. Dennis Richie had just finished reading a National Lampoon parody of the Lord of the Rings called “Bored of the Rings.” Unix as a parody of Multics mean to “to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels” Ken Thompson would go on to describe A this way “Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal, called ‘A’. ‘A’ looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the direct memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the central concept of the language. This was Dennis’s contribution, and he in fact coined the term “pointer” as an innocuous sounding name for a truly malevolent construct.” Anyone who has gotten a null pointer exception should know that their pain is intentional. The prank evolved into B and then C. By the way, the hoax is a hoax. But there is a little truth to every lie. The truth here is that in many ways, C is the anti-pascal. I blame Berkeley in the 60s. But not for wasting your time with the hoax. For that I blame me. I mean, first I blame the creators of Unix, then me.

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technato · 6 years ago

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How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age

In the 1980s, the USSR’s unlikely computer-literacy campaign nurtured a generation of techies

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Illustration: Chris Malbon

Despite the ubiquity of computers in modern society, the vast majority of today’s students never study computer science or computer programming. Those who are exposed to these subjects typically learn low-level skills rather than undertaking any deeper exploration of computational concepts or theory. In earlier decades, a few countries did promote computer education at the national level. In the 1980s, for example, the British government launched a popular and quite successful initiative that brought thousands of BBC Micros into classrooms.

But the most ambitious computer literacy program ever conceived is one you’ve probably never heard of, and it originated in a very unlikely place: the Soviet Union.

Perhaps you’re smiling to yourself, recalling the old trope about how the USSR invented Tetris and yet lost the Cold War. Implicit in this dismissal is the failure of the Soviets to fully appreciate the awesome power of the digital age. It’s true that the Soviet government never embraced a national computer network or provided its citizens with affordable personal computers. But if you subscribe to this narrative of technological stumbles and political failure, then you’re missing an important, not to mention fascinating, part of the story of global computerization—one in which Soviet teenagers latched onto a popular sci-fi novel of adventure and self-discovery and taught themselves and each other how to program using the only means available to them: the programmable calculator.

In September 1985, ninth graders all across the USSR began studying a new subject: Basics of Informatics and Computing Technology. The rollout of the compulsory course, which aimed to make programming a universal skill, was to be accompanied by new textbooks in 15 national languages, training for some 100,000 teachers, and a million computers for the 60,000 or so middle schools across the Soviet republics.

None of this went smoothly. The state didn’t supply schools with equipment, efforts to print and distribute course literature were uneven, and many teachers never received the requisite training.

Meanwhile, the move sparked an international debate among computer experts over the very definition of “computer literacy.” The U.S. computer scientist and entrepreneur Edward Fredkin argued that his country’s experience should inform the Soviets:

We now understand that computer literacy is not knowing how to program. It is not understanding how [a] computer works. It is not knowing about bits and bytes and flip-flops and gates…. We now know that true computer literacy means having the skills to use the advanced application programs, such as word processing and spreadsheet systems.

In response, the computer scientist Andrei Ershov quipped that coding and typing were not mutually exclusive. Ershov was head of the Akademgorodok Computer Center [PDF] in the Siberian science city of Akademgorodok, and he had emerged as the computer literacy campaign’s key promoter. In stark contrast to Fredkin, he viewed computer literacy as nurturing a set of intellectual habits, which he called “algorithmic thinking.”

Photo: Sergei Frolov/Soviet Digital Electronics Museum

Calculator Rules: At a time when few Soviet households had personal computers, programmable calculators like the Elektronika B3-34 took on many roles.

That idea grew in part out of Ershov’s time as a student of Aleksei Liapunov, a towering figure of Soviet cybernetics. From Liapunov, Ershov learned to think in terms of cybernetic metaphors and to draw connections between technology and society. He conceived of algorithms as a form of communication between humans and machines.

Ershov also drew on ideas from the West. In September 1958, he was among an elite group of Soviet computer experts to meet with their American counterparts. His exchange with the computer pioneer Alan Perlis, who would later become the first recipient of the Turing Award, proved particularly fruitful. Perlis shared with Ershov his enthusiasm for developing a universal algorithmic language, called Algol, which aimed to make software portable and international. Ershov embraced Algol’s agenda, and he went on to develop one of the most ambitious compilers for the language in the early 1960s. The universalist aspirations of the Algol community would inform his views on computer education.

Ershov’s educational agenda was also inspired by a visit to MIT in the early 1970s, where he met Seymour Papert and learned of his computer education experiments with Logo, a programming language designed for use by children.

And yet, while Ershov closely followed developments in Western computer science, he believed the Soviet Union should forge its own path to the information age, one imbued with socialist values, less dependent on computers as black-boxed commodities and more focused on building citizens’ skills and habits of mind. By learning to program, he argued, students would develop abstract reasoning and a goal-oriented, problem-solving mind-set. By the end of the 1970s, Ershov and his team in Akademgorodok had formulated their literacy program, developing their curriculum with the help of Siberian students and testing it in local schools.

Of course, Ershov knew he needed much broader support to implement such a curriculum nationally. He began tirelessly promoting his idea of programming as a “second literacy” to Soviet authorities, computer experts, educators, parents, and children, as well as to the international community. Finally, in 1985, in a wave of transformative policies adopted with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendance to power, the Akademgorodok informatics curriculum was officially adopted.

Photo: Photographic Archive/Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences

Algorithmic Thought: Computer scientist Andrei Ershov [standing, left] championed computer literacy for all citizens of the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1985, ninth graders took a compulsory course entitled Basics of Informatics and Computing Technology.

The inefficiencies of Soviet planning and economics meant that most ninth graders studied the curriculum without computers on which to test their new skills. This wasn’t seen as an obstacle by the reformers. Instead, the teaching materials encouraged writing out programs on paper and engaging in imaginative exercises. Students, for instance, acted out the role of a robot named Dezhurik (from the Russian word dezhurnyi, the person responsible for maintaining the classroom), who was programmed to “close window” or “clean blackboard.” When students from the remote city of Khabarovsk complained about the lack of classroom computers, Ershov commended them for taking the initiative to write and emphasized that the youths still had the chance to “catch up to the train to the future.”

But he refused to commiserate with them. What they were learning—how to devise an algorithm and write a program for it—was the essential part, he said, whether or not they ever got to run the program on an actual computer. Ershov’s letter to the students concluded: “If the teacher may have pity on you and give you a satisfactory grade, the computer will not forgive you any errors. It will stay there, an impenetrable piece of metal, up to the end of the school year. Without an algorithm, without a program, without a plan, there is no point in sitting in front of the computer.”

Soviet citizens may have lacked access to PCs, but many millions of them did have access to computational devices, in the form of scientific programmable calculators. These handheld devices could store instructions and numbers in memory for later execution. Popular in the West following the 1974 introduction of the HP-65 by Hewlett-Packard, programmable calculators still have their fans and their uses.

In the Soviet Union, from the mid-1970s on, the microelectronics industry produced electronic calculators by the millions, primarily for use by what was then the world’s largest population of engineers. As in the West, Soviet calculator users were instrumental in shaping the development of programs and applications for the devices. Unlike in the West, few Soviets had home computers, and so the calculator took on many more roles—including as a makeshift computing platform for computer education and a thriving game culture.

Gamification

In August 1985, the Soviet science magazine Tekhnika Molodezhi began publishing a serialized novel about a pair of explorers trying to fly a lunar lander from the moon to Earth. Each installment included tasks to be worked out on a programmable calculator.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzE0MDQzOQ.jpeg" data-original="/image/MzE0MDQzOQ.jpeg" id="1925169948_0" alt="The premise of the novel, Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth, was the popular computer game Lunar Lander, in which players controlled thrusters and calculated trajectories to guide their landers to the moon’s surface.”> 1/6

The premise of the novel, Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth, was the popular computer game Lunar Lander, in which players controlled thrusters and calculated trajectories to guide their landers to the moon’s surface. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzE0MDQ0Mg.jpeg" data-original="/image/MzE0MDQ0Mg.jpeg" id="1925169948_1" alt="An earlier attempt to popularize computer literacy campaign in TM was a column on programming with the most popular Soviet calculator, the Elektronika B3-34. But reader response to the column was poor.”> 2/6

An earlier attempt to popularize computer literacy campaign in TM was a column on programming with the most popular Soviet calculator, the Elektronika B3-34. But reader response to the column was poor. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzE0MDQ0NQ.jpeg" data-original="/image/MzE0MDQ0NQ.jpeg" id="1925169948_2" alt="Each chapter of Kon-Tiki concluded with puzzles on the physics of space travel and programming tricks. Here, the discussion deals with what happens when the lander’s fuel is depleted or if the acceleration exceeds human tolerance.”> 3/6

Each chapter of Kon-Tiki concluded with puzzles on the physics of space travel and programming tricks. Here, the discussion deals with what happens when the lander’s fuel is depleted or if the acceleration exceeds human tolerance. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzE0MDQ0OA.jpeg" data-original="/image/MzE0MDQ0OA.jpeg" id="1925169948_3" alt="Kon-Tiki‘s illustrations cleverly combined aesthetics with technical elements. This one relates to orbital stations.”> 4/6

Kon-Tiki‘s illustrations cleverly combined aesthetics with technical elements. This one relates to orbital stations. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

5/6

This 98-step program, which players entered by hand into their calculators, modeled circular and elliptical orbits near celestial bodies that lacked an atmosphere. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzE0MDQ1NA.jpeg" data-original="/image/MzE0MDQ1NA.jpeg" id="1925169948_5" alt="The Kon-Tiki serial proved an instant hit, and the magazine became a prominent forum for younger users of programmable calculators.”> 6/6

The Kon-Tiki serial proved an instant hit, and the magazine became a prominent forum for younger users of programmable calculators. Image: Tekhnika Molodezhi

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These two roles converged in a popular science magazine called Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technology for Youth), which was published by the Communist youth organization Komsomol. The publication was aimed at teenagers and had a subscriber base of 1.5 million. In January 1985, the magazine took up Ershov’s computer literacy campaign and began devoting a section to programming with the most popular Soviet calculator, the Elektronika B3-34, which sold for 85 rubles. Reader response to the column was disappointing, however.

Then in August 1985, TM began serializing the space-travel novel Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth. In this tale of an epic quest, an engineer and a pilot attempt, against all odds, to fly a lunar lander from the moon back to Earth. The premise of the novel was the popular U.S. computer game Lunar Lander, in which players controlled thrusters and calculated trajectories to safely guide their landers to the lunar surface. The Soviet version was called Lunalet. Each installment of the novel invited readers to take up their calculators, transforming themselves into pilots and their devices into spaceships.

The Kon-Tiki serial was an instant hit, and the magazine soon became one of the most prominent forums for younger users of programmable calculators. The futuristic narrative of each chapter was combined with puzzles on the physical laws of space travel and tricks for programming the B3-34. But what kept readers reading was the dramatic plot and the novel’s focus on overcoming human and technological limits.

A reference to Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean, Kon-Tiki was also the name of the tiny vessel chosen by the novel’s protagonists for their earthbound voyage. The story line evolved far beyond the game’s original goal of landing the spacecraft. The “path to the Earth” became a journey of self-discovery. At one point, the pilot, called Moon Hawk, reflects on his own fallibility: “I am not a computer; I am a human, and it is typical for me to make mistakes. Because of that I can’t choose a path that does not allow for mistakes. Of course, in cases when I have a choice, I will prefer the way that gives me the right to make a mistake and simultaneously an opportunity to correct it.”

The heroes stumble even at the novel’s conclusion: They arrive back on Earth only to touch down in the ocean and are forced to send out an SOS. “After all, I am a cosmonaut, not a sea captain,” admits the pilot, as they await rescue.

Photo: Tekhnika Molodezhi

Mikhail Pukhov, author of Kon-Tiki: A Path to the Earth.

Credit for the novel’s clever intertwining of programming and storytelling goes to its author, Mikhail Pukhov, who was also editor of TM’s sci-fi section. The son of a prominent mathematician, Pukhov graduated from the country’s most prestigious engineering school, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Abandoning a promising career at the Central Scientific-Research Radio Engineering Institute, he had turned to writing and editing.

Before starting Kon-Tiki, Pukhov thoroughly explored the calculator’s functions as well as its malfunctions. Calculator users in the West and in the East alike were quick to discover and exploit the devices’ undocumented features, pushing them to do things their designers never intended. Such exploration became known as errorology, from the “EГГОГ” message that would frequently appear on the small display at the execution of an undocumented feature. Pukhov’s novel glorified errorology with poetic descriptions of “fishing” for unusual combinations of symbols.

And readers responded, writing to TM about their own calculator exploits. “I inform you that I obtained an easy way for creating any combination from the numbers and symbols ‘Е,’ ‘Г,’ ‘С,’ ‘L,’ ‘–,’ which do not begin from zero on the display of the B3-34,” boasted one reader. To have their programs and names printed in TM was the highest aspiration of many readers.

Thus did TM and its sci-fi editor help cultivate a generation of hackers and computer enthusiasts. If you find it odd that a major state-sanctioned Soviet magazine promoted hacking practices, consider how U.S. hacker culture emerged—as a form of hands-on technological investigation. In his 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy traced the origin of MIT’s hackers to a club of railroad buffs. Similarly, in the Soviet Union, a combination of state interests and grassroots initiatives had nurtured a hands-on culture among radio amateurs. For a radio engineer like Pukhov, as well as for the educators who used the novel in the classroom, subverting the calculator’s design specifications was a way to encourage technical skills.

The community of readers and players that formed around Kon-Tiki unwittingly embraced the goals of programming literacy as conceived by Ershov. In their letters to TM, many requested more games as well as flowcharts for rewriting the programs for other kinds of calculators. One reader wrote that he aspired “to see the program as a conscious pattern of actions, and not as a thoughtless row of symbols. To be able, with the help of your magazine, not only to execute the available programs but to create [new programs] myself.” In this sense, the novel and its community of calculator users contributed to the spread of Ershov’s vision of computer literacy.

But was Ershov’s curriculum a success? The results of any educational initiative are, of course, hard to gauge. Soviet statisticians no doubt monitored the reform effort in some fashion, but that data would hardly capture real-world experiences in the classroom and beyond.

I posted on several Russian calculator-user forums hoping to hear from Kon-Tiki readers. The responses I received were tinged with nostalgia. Some wrote that their fascination with the novel spurred them to get a calculator. “For half a year, like a vacuum cleaner, I was absorbing all information available on programming and calculators in particular,” wrote one forum member, explaining how he learned the principles of programming before acquiring a device of his own. For others, the calculator was but a stepping-stone; eventually they earned enough money to buy computer kits (available in perestroika-era street markets) and assemble their own machines. Meanwhile, copies of TM continued to circulate via secondhand shops, where new groups of readers discovered the novel long after its original publication. Today you can easily find electronic versions of the magazine online, along with calculator emulators.

The extent to which such school-age experiences influenced people’s professional lives is less clear. Unless you lived through it, you may not fully appreciate the enormous disruption brought on by the economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union—in Russia, those years are known as “the wild 1990s.” Kon-Tiki’s readers came of age as citizens of the emerging sovereign states. Few of them had full control over their career options, and for many, coding became a calling, a gig, and a gateway. These days in Russia, the “universality” of programming skills is no longer associated with creating a computer-literate society. Instead, it raises the prospect of migration, as skilled programmers choose to leave the country to pursue their careers.

Photo: Photographic Archive/Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences

Paper Programming: At a 1986 summer school for young programmers, Andrei Ershov worked with students. Most Soviet schools didn’t have computers, and students were encouraged to write out their programs on paper. “Without an algorithm, without a program, without a plan, there is no point in sitting in front of the computer,” Ershov wrote.

Soviet-era efforts to foster computer literacy cast Western assumptions about the information age in a different light. Unlike events in the West, the Soviet digital revolution was not one of geeks and geniuses but of state-sponsored academics, writers, and educators, who worked with government officials, industrialists, and programmers toward a shared goal. It was not predicated on the personal computer but instead made do with calculators, pencil and paper, and students’ own imaginations.

Despite the passion of digital enthusiasts like Ershov and Pukhov, the campaign’s ideal of universality was hard to attain. The reform seemed to work best where you would expect it to, in the elite schools of the capitals and in a few remote schools blessed with wealthy patrons, such as those supported by the oil and gas industry. TM transcended some geographical and economic barriers and provided a motivation, an entry point, and a community to students who lacked inspiring teachers or computers of their own. But the magazine failed to bridge another familiar divide—that of gender. Unlike the population of Soviet professional programmers, and unlike the compulsory and gender-neutral informatics classes, the readers who wrote to TM about their calculator exploits were predominantly male.

And so, the digital socialist society that Ershov and others strove for was imperfectly realized. Neither Ershov, who died in 1988, nor the country itself survived long enough for the experiment to run its course. And yet, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss a vision of computer literacy that considered all students capable of thinking algorithmically. The Soviets did not prefigure the many challenges of the information age. But what we choose to remember from our computing pasts can help determine how we solve our present-day conundrums.

This article appears in the October 2018 print issue as “The Great Soviet Calculator Hack.”

When Calculators Were Revolutionary

Photo: Mattieu Wyart

Historical research can take its practitioners to unexpected places. So it was for Ksenia Tatarchenko. In the article above, she delves into an ambitious 1980s program to make teenagers in the USSR computer literate.

Because most Soviet households and schools lacked actual computers, many students made do with programmable calculators. A popular science magazine spurred on their interest using the computer game Lunar Lander and a serialized sci-fi novel. In the game, you try to land on the moon by entering power levels for your rocket as you descend. In the novel, an engineer and a pilot take their tiny lander from the moon all the way back to Earth. “Many people played the game,” says Tatarchenko, who is a lecturer at the University of Geneva. “And so I thought, Well, it must be easy.”

Her mother, who lives in Novosibirsk, Russia, bought a 1980s calculator and sent it to Tatarchenko. Operating the calculator, she discovered, was far from easy. To play the game, you had to enter its 97 steps into the calculator. But rendering equations in reverse Polish notation, in which you punch in all the numbers and then the operators, was counterintuitive. And the assignments included with each of the novel’s installments required a familiarity with the physics of spaceflight. Some readers went well beyond those tasks, creating their own games. “I tried and tried, but I never reached the stage of inventing my own game.”

Still, she says, she enjoyed learning about this underappreciated device. She welcomes readers’ stories about how they used programmable calculators in their youth. In the West, Tatarchenko notes, the personal computer is what’s credited with sparking the digital age. But in the Soviet Union, the programmable calculator proved just as revolutionary.

How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

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sushiismymiddlename · 7 years ago

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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LAST YEAR YOU HAD TO BE PREPARED TO EXPLAIN HOW IT'S RECESSION-PROOF IS TO DO EXACTLY WHAT YOU SHOULD DO IN COLLEGE IS WORK ON YOUR OWN PROJECTS

We know who one another are. They have to, or die. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. I know because I once tried to convince the powers that be that we had to make search better, and users will gradually seep over to you. One of the biggest startups got started. We can't afford to have any illusions about the predictors of success. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding. Howard Aiken said Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. We used to show people how to build real, working stores. Would that mean too much due diligence? You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to filter them.

You hear all kinds of reasons why startups fail. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. The European approach reflects the old idea that each person has a natural station in life. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a company at 18 if they wanted to hire with the investor money, and they were still worrying about wasting a few gigs of disk space. They wanted to get staffed up as soon as you can in school, right? The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they don't give customers what they want by themselves. A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school know about this mysterious thing called business if they would be the president.

Why risk it? I'm not proposing the primary goal of education should be to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they could receive the training appropriate to it. At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else. But for someone at the top of the field, what's the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. That depends on how ambitious you feel.

We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in which performance is therefore unbounded. Just continue running your company as if this deal didn't exist. Simula: Algol isn't good enough at manipulating arrays. Another area in which you could easily surpass Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. Common Lisp: There are too many dialects of Lisp. When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. I doubt they could do it in a way that doesn't suck though. But it doesn't matter much either way. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to do is not to invent, but to learn and do.

You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. But Dropbox was a much better idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his skills. Imagination means having odd ideas about technology without also having odd ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mistakenly high opinion of your abilities, because that encourages you to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the founders of a startup and stay in grad school the whole time, and part of the deal. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. When they advertise Java programming jobs, they also want Python experience. We wouldn't want to stop and think about that.

And what we've found is that the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Is the mathematician a small man because he's discontented? The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the wave. What I didn't grasp at the time—didn't sell out. The company I'd been consulting for seemed to be running into trouble, and there are companies that will give $2 million to a startup that fails, the proximate cause is running out of money while you're trying to solve by sending you email? If you go to VC firms they have to choose between several alternatives, there's an upper bound on your performance: choosing the best every time. One sense of normal is statistically normal: what everyone else in it is overlooking. Suppose your company is to operate, the harder it is to buy stock in growing companies as opposed to real estate, or bonds, or stocks bought for the dividends they pay. When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars, you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company. You had to for guests. So it is with hacking: the more you push the good stuff toward the front, the more ideas you implement, the more a project has to count as research, the less pressure they feel to act smart.

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